The end of the ‘ARC/INFO driving licence’ era

The discussion about the future of the GIS ‘profession’ has flared up in recent days – see the comments from Sean Gorman, Steven Feldman (well, citing me) and Don Meltz among others. My personal perspective is about the educational aspect of this debate.

I’ve been teaching GIS since 1995, and been involved in the MSc in GIS at UCL since 1998 – teaching on it since 2001. Around 1994 I was contemplating the excellent MSc in GIS programme in Edinburgh, though I opted to continue with my own mix of geography and computer science, which turned out to be great in the end – but I can say that I have been following the trends in GIS education for quite a while.

Based on this experience, I would argue that the motivation for studying an MSc in GIS over the past 20 years was to get the ‘ARC/INFO driving licence’. I use ARC/INFO as a metaphor – you can replace it with any other package, but ARC/INFO was the de facto package for teaching GIS (and its predecessor ArcGIS is today), so it is suitable shorthand. What I mean by that is that for a long time GIS packages were hard to use and required a significant amount of training in order to operate successfully. Even if a fairly simple map was needed, the level of technical knowledge and the number of steps required were quite significant. So employers, who mostly wanted someone who could make them maps, recruited people who gained skills in operating the complex packages that allow the production of maps.

The ‘ARC/INFO driving licence’ era included an interesting dissonance – the universities were telling themselves that they were teaching the principles of GIScience but the students were mostly interested in learning how to operate a GIS at a proficient level to get a job. I’ve seen and talked with enough students to recognise that many of them, in their daily jobs, rarely used the spatial statistical analysis that we were teaching and they mostly worked at ‘taming the beast’, which GIS was.

As expected, at UCL there was always a group that was especially interested in the principles of GIScience and that continued their studies beyond the MSc. But they are never the majority of the cohort.

The model worked well for everyone – universities were teaching GIS by a combination of principles and training of specific packages and the students found jobs at the end and joined GIS departments in different organisations.

The disruption that changed this arrangement started in the late 1990s, with Oracle Spatial starting to show that GIS can be integrated in mainstream products. The whole process accelerated around 2005 with the emergence of GeoWeb, Free and Open Source GIS (FOSS GIS) and the whole range of applications that come with it. Basically, you don’t need a licence any more. More and more employers (even GIS consultancies) are not recruiting from GIS education programmes – they are taking computing professionals and teaching them the GIS skills. Going through an MSc in GIS to be proficient with a tool is not necessary.

So in an era in which you don’t need a licence to join the party, what is the MSc in GIS for?

The answer is that it can be the time when you focus on principles and on improving specific skills. Personally, that was my route to education. I started working in GIS software development without much more than high school education in 1988. After hearing people around me talking about registers, bugs, polygons and databases I was convinced that I must understand these principles properly. So I went for a degree that provided me with the knowledge. In the same way, I would expect that MSc programmes cater for the needs of people who gain some practical experience with operating geospatial technologies and want to learn the principles or become specialists in specific aspects of these systems.

We already see people doing the MSc while working with GIS – currently studying an MSc by distance learning or in the evening is very popular and I expect that this will continue. However, the definition of what is covered by GIS must be extended – it should include everything from Bing Maps API to PostGIS to ArcGIS.

I can also see the need for specialised courses – maybe to focus on the technical development of geospatial technologies or maybe on spatial statistical analysis for those who want to become geographical information analysts. I would also expect much more integration of GIS with other fields of study where it is taught as a tool – just look at the many MSc programmes that currently include GIS. I’m already finding myself teaching students of urban design, development planning or asset management.
All in all, I’m not going to feel sorry that the ‘ARC/INFO driving licence’ era is coming to its end.

Terra Future 2009 – OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey

I have checked on Twitter to see how the follow-up meeting to Terra Future 2009, last Friday, went. It was a very pleasant surprise to see that the idea that I have put forward in February, that the Ordnance Survey should consider hosting OpenStreetMap and donate some data to it, was voted the best idea that came out of Terra Future 2009. With this sort of peer-review of the idea, and with the added benefit of 2 months for rethinking, I still think that it is quite a good idea.

The most important aspect of this idea is to understand that OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey can both thrive in the GeoWeb era. Despite the imaginary competition, each has a clear value to certain parts of the marketplace. There are a very clear benefits that the OpenStreetMap community can gain from working closely with the Ordnance Survey – such as some aspects of mapping that the Ordnance Survey are highly knowledgeable about, and vice versa, such as how to innovate in delivery of geographical information. A collaborative model might work after all…

I wonder how this idea will evolve now?

The implications of the ten-year lag of geotechnologies

If we take the lag of geotechnologies behind mainstream computing as a common feature of this type of technology, there are quite interesting conclusions that can be drawn in terms of developing new applications and products. For example, it can help in predicting when certain technology will be ready for wide application in the geographical field.

Here is an example: very recently, Jakob Nielsen reported that he was positively surprised with the quality of reading from the Amazon Kindle 2, and that this is leading him to withdraw his conclusion that the efficiency of reading from a computer screen is low.

I’ve written about the problem of computer monitor resolution and the use of small screens for urban navigation – such as the use of maps for tourism where you would like to have a map that gives you a wider context of your area than the ‘tunnel vision’ that is provided on today’s mobile phones.

So here is my guess: in about 10 years, Kindle 10, or whatever its equivalent at that point, will be a suitable platform for delivering clever maps that can be as effective as paper maps. That means that if you are in the business of creating maps that will be used on these devices, you should start exploring how best to deliver them in about 5 years.

I can also guess that it will be more energy hungry, wasteful and way too expensive when compared to the paper tourist maps of today, but the prediction is about technology – not about what I think about its use…

Do Geotechnologies constantly lag behind the mainstream by about ten years?

While working on a text about HCI and GIS, I started to notice a general pattern of ten years or so delay between the dates a new functionality starts to become ‘mainstream’ in general computer use and when it becomes common in GIS.

Here are some examples: the early use of computers in the business environment was in the mid to late 1950s, but we had to wait until the late 1960s to get the first full-scale GIS (and even that was fairly primitive). Personal computers and microcomputers appeared in the late 1970s with machines such as the Apple II, which started to be used by many small offices for word processing and accounting, but the first PC GIS application, Mapinfo, appeared only in the second half of the 1980s. Human-Computer Interaction emerged as a field of research in the early 1980s, but only in the early 1990s was it recognised by GIS researchers. Graphical User Interfaces were first implemented in mainstream computing in the very early 1980s, and didn’t arrive to GIS until the 1990s. Finally, notice how e-commerce, e-mail and other Web applications were very successful in the early 1990s, but only in the mid 2000s did the GeoWeb emerge, with the success of Google Maps.

Several other examples of this gap exist – for example, the use of SQL databases. Even if you search for the earliest research paper or documentation for a major GIS functionality with a parallel in the mainstream, this lag appears. Some very early research appears around 5 years after the mainstream use (see the first HCI and GIS paper as an example) but it will take at least another 5 years to see it in real products that are used outside research labs.

This observation explains, to me, two puzzles: first, why is it that, for the two decades that I’ve been working with GIS, it keeps being referred to as an ‘emerging technology’? The answer is that it is always catching up so, for the journalist, who is familiar with other areas of computing, it feels like something that is emerging; second, why are companies that are getting into geotechnologies early either failing (examples aplenty in the Location-based services area in the 1990s) or needing about 10 years of survival to become successful? The reason here is that they are too optimistic about the technical challenges that they are facing.

I think that the lag is due to the complexities of dealing with geographical information, and the need for hardware and software to get to the stage when geographical applications are possible. Another reason is the relative lack of investment in the development of geotechnologies, which were considered for a long time niche applications.

What is your explanation for the gap?

Public geography, public geographers and neogeography

Engaging Geography is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded seminar series, originally conceived by Duncan Fuller, who is sadly missed. The seminars are an appropriate tribute to his memory. The first seminar was held in Newcastle at the end of January and there will be 5 more over the next 2 years. So there plenty of opportunities to join!

The seminar gave special attention to public geographies – such as films that are an output of academic geographical research; photography and exhibitions by artists who deal with geographical issues in their work; and the wide range of examples that are coming out of the work of geography teachers and school geography.

The seminar was thought-provoking with lots of practical demonstrations and discussions about many issues – including how gender influences public geographies, the impact of communication, private geographies and many other issues that were packed into the two-day seminar.

During the discussions, Daniel Raven-Ellison, who runs Guerrilla Geography and Urban Earth, noted that the rapid increase in digital geography (neogeography) where geography is ‘used’ by many is one of the best examples of public geographies. This made me think more about the meaning of public geography and public geographers in the context of neogeography.

I would argue that we should differentiate between systems (websites) that are not based on user-generated content (mash-ups and public mapping sites) and those that require active geographic contribution from the user.

As Byron Antoniou (who is doing his PhD at UCL) noted, within the websites that are based on user-generated spatial content, we should differentiate between geographically explicit systems (OpenStreetMap, Geograph) and geographically implicit systems (Flickr, Wikipedia). The latter can hold geographic information, but that is not their main objective.

So, when users use a public mapping site passively, they don’t engage with the geography of the place fully. They consume a geographical image and, because of the nature of browsing, this image will disappear in the general haze of the many pages and images that they are exposed to. Considering that the average user might view up to 150 pages a day, this is no more ‘public geography’ than a map in a newspaper. Even the programmers that construct mash-ups are not ‘public geographers’ – they are concerned with the automation of the representation, and very rarely consider the visualisation carefully. Not surprisingly, the exceptions (such as London Profiler) have been created by people with a deeper understanding of geography.

In geographically implicit systems, there is some engagement with geography, but it is limited and might even be mechanical. For example, if GPS information is used to automatically geotag an image on Flickr or Picasa, the user is not actively engaged with the geography of their image. The engagement can be higher for example when a person creates a memory map, or manually locates the image position on the map, as it forces the person to recall the real world geography and match it with the map.

Finally, geographically explicit systems are, in my view, mostly public geographies. Because of the task that they were designed for, contributors are aware of the geography that they engage with both in the digital form and in the real world. For example, when a participant captures a road in OpenStreetMap, she is forced to consider the real world characteristics of the street as well as its digital representation. Thus, a meaningful engagement with space and place is an integral part of working with these systems.

Yet, because of participation inequality, even in geographically explicit systems only a small group of participants (about 10% or maybe less) are becoming deeply engaged with the process and working with the system for a period of time that allows them to develop a fuller geographical understanding of projections, scale, place, space and other ‘deep’ geographical concepts.

So while it might seem that there is an explosion of digital mapping information and applications, the number of public geographers – while growing – is quite small.

The success of collaborative research

Just as 2008 ended, Marc Farr, Jess Wardlaw and Kate Jones were awarded the IJMR Collaborative Research Award from the Market Research Society. Jess is working with me on the Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Dr Foster Intelligence, while Kate is leading the GIS work on the Towards Successful Suburban Town Centres project. They’ve joined together to write the paper:

Farr, M., Wardlaw, J. and Jones, C. (2008)  Tackling Health Inequalities using Geodemographics: A Social Marketing Approach. International Journal of Market Research, 50, 4, pp. 449-468.

As the title suggests, the paper was about Dr Foster’s social marketing work and how we use geodemographic data to target health interventions, and compared the methodology to traditional market research methods. The statement from the award commission is rather nice:

‘This new Award recognises genuine co-operation between the practitioner (agency, client, etc.) and academic communities. Tackling Health Inequalities using Geodemographics – A Social Marketing Approach is an excellent example of the innovative methods being applied to the challenges faced by the UK public sector. It demonstrates how social marketing is being adopted in targeting healthcare priorities, and the role played by Dr Foster Intelligence as a public-private partnership in providing information to help achieve this goal.’

So well done to Jess, Kate and Marc!

Nestoria interview

Nestoria is a property search engine covering the European market, based on Web 2.0 technologies such as mashups; in this case, a Google Maps mashup to show the locations of the properties. The company blog run a monthly interview and I had the pleasure of being the Nestoria interviewee for this month.

The interview addresses several aspects of neogeography, including the reasons for its rise and the implications for professional GISers. I comment on results from my evaluation of OpenStreetMap data and the implications of crowdsourced geographic information on businesses such as Nestoria.

The interview can be accessed on the Nestoria blog.

A really useful mash-up demonstration

Over the summer, one of my students, Chris Osborne, worked together with Nestoria to create a demonstration of a mash-up that can help users find where they can live, i.e. rent or buy a home, at a given travel-time distance from a given underground or DLR station, assuming that they are using the network to commute. Building on the concepts that MySociety developed in their travel-time maps, Chris created the application by screen-scraping the journey planner of Transport for London and integrated it with Nestoria’s property information.

I had been thinking about this type of application for a long while, but before Google Maps APIs and the technologies of Web 2.0, this was practically impossible. Even though the demonstration proves that it is possible for one developer now to accomplish this task – which was something unimaginable even 3 years ago – it is still fairly challenging. Travel information is not readily available and calculating travel time for lots of places is not a trivial task.

In addition, Chris integrated user-centred design principles and has done a very good job in creating an effective – and really useful – application. I can imagine this application continuing to develop to become, practically, a multi-criteria analysis system for people to find places to live in. Chris is going for the ‘Show Us a Better Way’ competition, and I hope that he’ll be able to continue and develop the application further.

OpenStreetMap Quality evalution and other comparisons

A comparison of my analysis of OpenStreetMap (OSM) quality evaluation to other examples of quality evaluation brings up some core issues about the nature of the new GeoWeb and the use of traditional sources. The examples that I’m referring to are from Etienne Cherdlu’s SOTM 2007 ‘OSM and the art of bicycle maintenance’, Dair Grant’s comparison of OSM to Google Maps and reality, Ed Johnson’s analysis this summer and Steven Feldman’s brief evaluation in Highgate.

Meridian 2 and OSM in the area of Highgate, North London

The first observation is of the importance and abundance of well georeferenced, vector-derived public mapping sites, which make several of these comparisons possible (Chedlu, Dair and Feldman). The previous generation of stylised street maps is not readily available for a comparison. In addition to the availability, the ease with which they can be mashed-up is also a significant enabling factor. Without this comparable geographical information, the evaluation would be much more difficult.

Secondly, when a public mapping website was used, it was Google Maps. If Microsoft’s Virtual Earth had also been used, it would arguably allow a three-way comparison as the Microsoft site uses Navteq information, while Google uses TeleAtlas information. Using Ordnance Survey (OS) OpenSpace for comparison is also a natural candidate. Was this familiarity that led to the selection of Google Maps? Or is it because the method of comparison is visual inspection, so adding a third source makes it more difficult? Notice that Google has the cachet of being a correct depiction of reality, which Etienne, Dair and Bob Barr demonstrated not to be the case!

Thirdly, and most significantly, only when vector data was used – in our comparison and in parts of what Ed Johnson has done – a comprehensive analysis of large areas became possible. This shows the important aspect of the role of formats in the GeoWeb – raster is fabulous for the delivery of cartographic representations, but it is a vector that is suitable for analytical and computational analysis. Only OSM allows the user easy download of vector data – no other mass provider of public mapping does.

Finally, there is the issue of access to information, tools and knowledge. As a team that works at a leading research university (UCL), I and the people who worked with me got easy access to detailed vector datasets and the OS 1:10,000 raster. We also have at our disposal multiple GIS packages, so we can use whichever one performs the task with the least effort. The other comparisons had to rely on publically available datasets and software. In such unequal conditions, it is not surprising that I will argue that the comparison that we carried out is more robust and consistent. The issue that is coming up here is the balance between amateurs and experts, which is quite central to Web 2.0 in general. Should my analysis be more trusted than those of Dair’s or Etienne’s, both of whom who are very active in OSM? Does Steven’s familiarity with Highgate, which is greater than mine, make him more of an expert in that area than my consistent application of analysis?

I think that the answer is not clear cut; academic knowledge entails the consistent scrutiny of the data, and I do have the access and the training to conduct a very detailed geographical information quality assessment. In addition, my first job in 1988 was in geographical data collection and GIS development, so I also have professional knowledge in this area. Yet, local knowledge is just as valuable in a specific area and is much better than a mechanical, automatic evaluation. So what is happening is an exchange of knowledge, methods and experiences between the two sides in which both, I hope, can benefit.

Are SatNavs dangerous?

The Daily Mirror recently put out a summer story on the risks of using SatNavs. While I would question the statistics and the reliability of the information, as it is probably based on a quick phone survey of 2000 people and then extrapolated in some unclear manner, I do think that we need to understand more about the tunnel vision that SatNav devices create in user’s mind.

The problem of showing a users only small section of reality without the full context is surely the right way to provide information in a short burst that does not risk them too much. While I still want to see some research on how long do users look at their SatNavs using an eye tracker (if anyone is willing to sponsor this – we’ve got the equipment!), I’m confident that there is solid reasoning behind the visualisation as it is now.

So, although this is suitable visualisation, we have an unintended consequence of tunnel vision view of the environment through which the user navigates. We are now starting to see some of the misshapes that occur due to this, and that is an area that requires more research and understanding.

See also the comments in the recent Interactions by Elisabeth Churchill about SatNav